Actually, even where there isn’t a waist seam, there may be a way. After I came up with this title, I remembered that we successfully added a back waist seam to a button-down shirt back in 2010 to get rid of the extra pouf that full-busted petites often get in regular garments. However, if a garment already has a waist seam, it’s that much easier. Of course “easier” is relative–I would only trust a skilled tailor or experienced home sewer with the alterations I’m going to show you in this post.

Here’s the Lucy dress out of the box on 5′ Camille. From the front it looks like a simple matter of shortening the hem and tightening the straps.
From the back you can see the buckling extra fabric.

Initially, I didn’t even think it was possible to change the torso length in our dresses until Camille clued me in. “If you have a really good tailor,” she told me, “they can remove the zipper, shorten the waist, and add the zipper back in. But I don’t know that kind of tailor.” Fortunately, I knew that kind of tailor. The next time Camille and I got together, we met at Nancy’s studio in Queens.

This is actually a photo from the second time we met with Nancy. She wanted Camille to try the dress on before she made the changes permanent. It was better, but we were stumped by how loose the straps still were.
Guess what? The solution was NOT to tighten or reposition the straps! Instead, we realized that we had been too conservative in how much fabric we’d taken up for Camille’s torso. Nancy ripped out the seams, removed the zipper again, and started over.
This time, not only did Nancy take fabric out of the back, she also took it out of the front.

At this point, Camille questioned whether alterations were worth it, or whether it would be better to have something custom made. Personally, I vote for alterations because (1) the designer has already sourced the quality fabric, which can be difficult to find, and (2) the dress completely fits around the bust and waist, something that is difficult to achieve for a large chest without a lot of trial and error–why reinvent the wheel when the designer has already worked through multiple patterns and muslins to achieve this fit?

There are so many variables when deciding whether to have something altered. In this case, the dress was gifted, and alterations came to $50 (I’m sure they would have been much more in Manhattan), so it was completely worth it. When we met at Nancy’s studio the following week, Camille was a lot happier with the result! She texted me later that when she looked at photos of the Lucy dress online, she was “so excited to see that it now fits on me exactly as it does on the model.”

This is what the Amy dress looked like on me before alterations. I was thinking of having it hemmed to the safety pin you see on the skirt. On our second visit to Nancy’s studio, I tried it with kitten heels and decided not to shorten it at all. I couldn’t make up my mind!

Not only did Nancy take the waist up. She also pinched out some excess fabric above my shoulder blades.
This lightweight wool dress has a 100% cotton lining, which meant that every step had to be done twice.
The changes were perfect the first time I tried it, so Nancy cut away the extra fabric and serged the edges.

Finally, I made up my mind and had three inches taken off the length.

Measuring and marking for the new hem before cutting.

I’m delighted with the results! Look for pics of the rest of the dress in my next post.

You can see a little pulling at the center seam at my butt. It may be that this is where the last few inches of the now too-long zipper begin to hang between the exterior and the lining. It’s not dramatic enough for me to ask to have it adjusted.